Fever (23 page)

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A writer with an adoring mass audience writes about his own love life at his peril. So it became one of the larger wrinkles of Springsteen's career at this point that his songs were more and more difficult to separate from his public life. While touring Europe, he was hounded by paparazzi and caught on a hotel balcony embracing his backup singer Patti Scialfa. The two's onstage duets were getting more and more suggestive, and although his recent bride, Phillips, was with him for part of the tour, his indiscretions caused a tabloid eruption and confirmed the uneasy tone of
Tunnel of Love
as a man who had married in haste and was sorting his way out of a mistake. Reading too much into this can be dangerous—clearly, Springsteen was not the serial killer in “Nebraska,” and of all the contemporary songwriters, his range of characters is more imaginative than any since Dylan. So if he is indeed singing about himself on
Tunnel of Love,
as with all good autobiographical writing, that's not all he's doing.

It's irresistible at this point to quote from Dave Marsh's
Glory Days
(1988), where Springsteen's biographer tries to make a case for Phillips as the perfect partner:

Julie Phillips only looked like a cheerleader; she was really an athlete who worked out intensely and race-walked several miles every day … One of the first things they did together was visit Julianne's Los Angeles health club, Matrix One. When Phillips came east, Bruce took her to Phil Dumphy's New Jersey workout spot … [Bruce thought Julie was strong enough] to fit the bill—in part, he thought, because “she was just tough; she had confidence and resilience and she wasn't afraid to confront facts or their implications.” A second advantage was that Julie was “well versed musically [sic],” meaning that she was exceptionally familiar with “all the great older records,” so that Bruce “never sensed or felt the age difference…” (It sure didn't hurt that both were Catholics, although Julie practiced far more often than Bruce) …

The key Marsh details in this passage are the names of the gyms Bruce and Julie work out at: this is meant to certify Marsh's insider status, when all it really does is give the gym bouncers headaches. This kind of Springsteen glorification made Marsh a pariah among rock critics: Springsteen had chosen himself a wife, so she must be made to fit Marsh's conception of him as the Ultimate Rock Hero. It's as if he thinks Springsteen fans are resentful simply because their hero up and married a model-actress. But isn't that what rock stars are supposed to do—play out the fantasies of anybody with riches and the right connections? Does Marsh really think that his fans are so naïve they'd rather him marry Rosie the Riveter, as he suggests?

After the “Glory Days” single came out, Springsteen's video to the song appeared, with Bruce the wannabe father taking his fictional son out to throw the ball. In the distance, Julie Phillips waved from the car. Springsteen's and Phillips's lives, it seems, had inverted the gender cliché about careers vs. families; Springsteen was desperate for fatherhood, while Phillips wanted to devote more time to her career.

Even though Springsteen's real-life first marriage didn't succeed, there's plenty of evidence on
Tunnel
that he's beginning to figure out why intimacy is so difficult, and what it takes to make long-term relationships work (“You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above”). If Springsteen's early work was spent probing just how screwed up his father, and a lot of the world, was, on
Tunnel of Love
he realizes that he's as screwed up as anybody else. “Walk Like a Man” acknowledges all a son's resentment and bitterness, but in a less self-destructive, more forgiving way. The metaphorical steps (“I didn't think there'd be so many steps I'd have to learn on my own”) point toward a new conception of male adulthood, and acknowledge the same father he rebelled against: the stalwart for family connections, the uncompromising individualist who never backs down from a confrontation, a man capable of grief and humility while carrying expectations nobody ever fully understands. Springsteen's early career was about escape; his later work would be about limits, and the futility of running away from them.

After his Tunnel of Love tour with the E Street Band, Springsteen settled in Los Angeles with Scialfa to start a family and disbanded the E Street troupe indefinitely. Then his work got patchy. The familial themes of
Lucky Town
and
Human Touch
(both 1992) and
The Ghost of Tom Joad
(1995) didn't reach the same heights of feeling, even though certain numbers reflected sustained craft (“With Every Wish,” “Lucky Town,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” “Books of Dreams,” “Living Proof,” “Gloria's Eyes,” “Cross My Heart,” and “Beautiful Reward”). “Man's Job” tries hard to live up to its refrain (“Lovin' you's a man's job, baby”), but the conceit fizzles (even though the song features a duet with Sam Moore of Sam and Dave fame). Other duets included Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers on “I Wish I Were Blind”; he even took Moore and Bobby King on tour. Marriage, domesticity, fatherhood, and mainstream rock success didn't fuel Springsteen's muse as much as send him flailing for song subjects. In castigating his double releases in the
L.A. Weekly
in 1992, Tom Carson redubbed him “the new Dylan,” a hilarious echo of his early hype as the Next Big Thing.

Springsteen's other inconsistent theme in the nineties was his self-reliance, and his misconceptions about his own work. Ever since his lawsuit with early manager Michael Appel, Springsteen's main producer was Jon Landau, alongside engineers Chuck Plotkin, Toby Scott, and Bob Clearmountain. But beginning with
Lucky Town
and
Human Touch,
Springsteen took production credit all to himself and simply thanked Landau in his acknowledgments.

It's hard to imagine the critic who helped bring
Born to Run
to life would have released both
Lucky Town
and
Human Touch
in their final forms, without expressing some misgivings about songs like “Human Touch,” “Roll of the Dice,” “Real World,” and “All or Nothin' at All”; even diehard fans agreed that a single album's worth of material here would have been the stronger move. And these releases set Springsteen's persona off on a bumpy course. He put together a new band of young turks (who tended to overplay), hit the road with his usual diligence, and turned in energetic concerts that had nowhere near the majesty of what he got from the E Street Band. As expected, a Springsteen show was heads above most everybody else's, but he had already set the bar much higher for himself.

On the other hand, after twenty years of recording, Springsteen had certainly earned the right to produce himself. (During this period, Springsteen also worked on a solo CD for wife Scialfa,
Rumble Doll,
a respectable effort that stiffed.) Landau is still a trusted advisor, apparently, and manages Springsteen's touring apparatus as one of the more respected outfits in the business. But it sure makes you wonder about how his persona might have fared if he'd stuck to songwriting and performing and left the editing and producing to others.

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By the time Springsteen put out
The Ghost of Tom Joad
in the fall of 1995, and mounted a worldwide solo acoustic tour, his dilemma was obvious. Although comfortably married, and siring children with great enthusiasm, his muse wasn't giving him the same meaty themes to write about. Never a druggie, he nonetheless risked the limbo of Richard Pryor syndrome: the funniest guy on the planet went through a life-changing trauma when cocaine freebase exploded in his face, and he was forced to become the clean, sober adult he always feared he would. The hitch was that while Pryor emerged happier, his humor tanked; his funniest work sprang from being an active addict.

When Springsteen entered a happy phase in his personal life, he didn't grapple with things nearly as poetically as before. Aesthetically, he had trouble finding his footing. After he'd turned in an anthem to AIDS victims with 1993's Oscar-winning theme song to Jonathan Demme's
Philadelphia, The Ghost of Tom Joad
begged for comparison to
Nebraska,
and it inevitably suffered. “Philadelphia” stirred listeners as a first-person diary of an AIDS victim, most of whom suffered the simultaneous double curse of gay prejudice and the virus emaciating their bodies. But where the
Joad
songs had an earthy sincerity (like the title track and “Galveston Bay”), there was not an “Atlantic City” or a “State Trooper” among them. The politics were politely leftist, but the pride-filled anger that swelled in Joad's characters' hearts was sketchy. It's almost as if having reached the mountaintop with
Born in the U.S.A.
and conquering the international stage as the Zeus of rock concerts, Springsteen was at a loss as to how to follow up his breakthrough moment in the eighties with material that extended all his earlier themes. Turning in an acoustic album, and doing a solo tour, seemed like an honorable next chapter.

This new Springsteen, doting father and husband, revealed a priggish side. Since he married Scialfa, and talked a lot about how he had been in the same relationship for thirty years only with different women, he quickly fended off all manner of flirtation. Women would yell out “I love you, Bruce,” and he would answer, “That gives me no pleasure, darlin'” or “‘Too much love make a man insane'—Jerry Lee Lewis, 1957.” When women screamed at his shows, he acted prudish, told audiences to be quiet. And the new stuff was simply outclassed by the oldies: “Adam Raised a Cain” seemed to cut even deeper on acoustic guitar than with the entire E Street Band, and there were a chafing hard-core blues version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” a vicious and bone-chilling “Nebraska,” a relentless and unforgiving “Darkness,” a roiling “Murder Incorporated,” and a haunting “Philadelphia” that upstaged Tom Hanks's death scene in the movie. Tellingly, there was little to be heard from
Tunnel of Love
(although some sets included “Tougher Than the Rest”). Springsteen looked trim and fit, hair pulled back into a ponytail, and incredibly intense about his work—almost as if he was doing it for himself and not his audience.

Two sources of inspiration lingered from before: women and working-class identification. In turning to his working-class roots, he had trouble finding new things to say (the best new songs were “Youngstown” and “Galveston Bay”). If he had grown, it was definitely as a guitar player—he plucked galaxies of sound out of these spare songs, and audiences were respectfully quiet enough to give at least the sound of the new Bruce a humbling audacity. He also found his footing on another subject, with a song called “Turning into Elvis,” about a man whose life starts falling apart with all the King's clichés: buying Caddies for strangers, gorging on peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, shooting out his TV set. “I'm turning into Elvis,” went the refrain, “and there's nothing I can do.” With a delivery that said “I'm beyond all this,” Springsteen laughed off the Presley curse once and for all.

One of the more troubling moments from this tour came during
Joad
's final song, which took the disc home on a sour note. He sang “My Best Was Never Good Enough for You” directly to his audience, and its mean-spirited overtones were unmistakable. Based on Jim Thomson's darkly comic novel
The Killer Inside Me
(1952), in which a psychopath Texas deputy, Lou Ford, throws suspicion off himself by engaging in dreary small talk with his fellow cops, “My Best” came from some creepy place in Springsteen's sensibility, where the smallest misstep conjured the largest of chips on his shoulder. Perhaps this mistrust and resentment was all of a piece with his infamous magnanimity. Why didn't he simply direct this song at his critics? Both
Lucky Town
and
Human Touch
were hits, after all, and none of the medium-sized halls on this tour were anything but sold out. His audience made an odd target for such bitterness.

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To his credit, Springsteen sensed something was missing, and by early 1995 he'd called his E Streeters in for a studio reunion to work on at least nine extra tracks for his long-awaited
Greatest Hits
and, ultimately, the worldwide reunion tour that began in Europe in the spring of 1999. A documentary by Ernie Fritz in 1996,
Blood Brothers,
showed the development of the new songs, “Blood Brothers,” “Secret Garden,” and “Back in Your Arms,” along with “Murder Incorporated” and “Hard Land,” both left over from
Born in the U.S.A.
sessions. So far this has been our only glimpse of Springsteen at work in the studio, and the sessions seem relaxed and productive. But Fritz eavesdropped on an even more entrenched stereotype: the men at work with the women as backup singers who looked after the kids.

If Springsteen is the “new man” he writes songs about, there were enough contradictions here to make you wonder. For starters, both Landau and Barbara Carr manage Springsteen, and Carr is Dave Marsh's wife. Landau is everywhere in this film—hiring an orchestrator, calling the record label, operating as Springsteen's sounding board for things like song selections and project titles. So where's Carr? Landau pontificates as only a former critic can, and fails to spin a song-sequence phone call into a larger subtext. You're thankful that Springsteen has someone this knowledgeable on board, but Landau makes a supercilious screen presence. Wife Patti Scialfa shows up for background vocals on some tracks and brings the kids by the control room during one session (there's charming footage of Springsteen teaching his son to say the word “guitar”).